Beyond Curricula: Helping Students Construct Knowledge through Teaching and Research

Examines different kinds of activities that can provide students with opportunities for integrating community service and curricular concerns, discusses how these service-learning activities are consistent with the academic goals of higher education, and identifies the structural contradictions that are revealed through efforts to promote service-learning activities within colleges and universities. In so doing, the author uses the constructivist model of the relationship between knowledge and learning, which suggests that for students to understand their curricula they must participate in activities similar to those through which curricula are designed and implemented in the first place.